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Notebooks 5 released

We kept you waiting longer than we anticipated, but when looking at the list below and when launching Notebooks 5 for the first time, we hope you understand that this is in fact a major update.

We gave Notebooks a more modern appearance and tried to make its usage more intuitive. So at first, things may look a little different, as certain buttons and functions have been rearranged, but on the whole, Notebooks should now be much easier and more fun to use.

The major topics are the new interface and support for formatted documents, but we also polished and improved the rest of Notebooks. We added many smaller features requested by our users, but if you still don’t find your personal favorite, please don’t worry, our list is still quite extensive.

By the way, Notebooks for iPhone and Notebooks for iPad are now both version 5.0

New Interface

More modern, more intuitive, less clutter; many things may look new, everything is still available, but in more obvious places

43 thoughts on “Notebooks 5 released”

GREAT job Alfons. Massive update and it was worth the wait. Unfortunately there seems to be a problem.

(ipad3 iOS 5.1)

If I added an image in the previous version I could tap that image to see it full size, then simply pinch (I think) to return to the note.

Now when I add an image and tap it, it simply shows the “thumbnail” version in its own screen. Swiping left and right simply cycles through the images I’ve added to the note and I can’t get back to the note without going through the tree again.

Also, the double tap full screen gesture seems a bit troublesome. It only works occasionally.

Other than these minor problems it’s a solid update. Tons of features and well worth the price!

The only real change we made here is that Notebooks no longer zooms images beyond 100%. Could this be the reason why they appear as thumbnails?

(Pinch to return to the note was not available in previous versions, either, but that is a nice idea 😉

The full screen gestures should work well as long as you did not start editing. Once you bring up the keyboard (and hide it again), the iOS “captures” the two finger tap and overrides Notebooks. We’ll have to see how we can improve that.

Ebsy, to see the seperate picture in a larger size you have to got to settings, write and edit, and set picture size to ‘original’ instead of ‘medium’. But unfortunately that doesn’t work with pictures which are already embedded, only when you add new pictures.

Notebooks has become one of the most useful and complete apps everyone should install on their iPad and use it on an everyday basis. The interface is much more beautiful now and (though it crashed twice while I was fiddling with it for the new features), it works neatly and the redesign made it much cleaner, logical, and more fun to use than before.

Thanks for your tremendous effort. I can see the translation onto Spanish has also improved, and so far, I have found it perfect 🙂

This is update is unbelievable, and exactly what I’ve been waiting for. The highlights for me are the rich text editing and the amazing sync capabilities. I’m now creating beautiful notes that sync automatically (and almost in real time) between iPad, iPhone, and my Mac.

I’ve tested almost every Notes application available for iOS, and for my needs, this is absolutely the best!

I am not sure if this is the appropriate place to report an issue. Unless I haven’t found a place to change the default, it appears that the ink color for a sketch defaults to white so that when you initially try to write something (using sketch for handwritten notes) nothing shows up because it is white on white. I changed the color to black and added some notes, left the sketch and came back to find the ink color back to white.

It would be great if you could create multipage sketches – I like to take meeting notes with handwriting versus typed text.

Thank you for this fantastic update. Just one question. I have been using custom colors for all my documents (blue background and white text) but the new version shows the as a ruled paper background and white text, which is impossible to read. I can change the background of each document, but I wonder if there is a global setting I am missing. Thank you.

Ned, thank you for the hint. The global setting didn’t carry to all my folders, but I just discovered that if you tap and hold a folder icon you can change the settings for all the documents within. Thank you.

Since I have updated Notebooks, the look of nearly all of my notes has changed: there are new automatic indentions at the beginning of every paragraph except for the first one.

Is it possible to get rid of these (in some cases very annoying) indentions without having to add a totally new document style, or do I really have to make a new theme and then change the style in every single note (even if I change the default of the document style in ‘settings’, and the style in all documents is set to ‘auto’, the style of each existing document changes only when I change the style manually)?
Apart from this, I like the ‘Default Theme’, an when I add a new theme, the headings look very different from the original ‘Default Theme’ (very large and bold), and there’s no way to look at the settings of the original ‘Default Theme’.

I was afraid that the changes we made to the default theme would not please everyone, it was a difficult decision… but that is why we implemented the option to add your own styles 😉

To avoid the indented paragraphs there are two options:

Use “Default” as paragraph style instead of “Paragraph” (from the pulldown menu with title, subtitle etc.). I do not know if this is ideal for existing documents, but it is worth mentioning for new documents.

The other option is using our styles as a starting point. They are available from the download area.

There are two other things that don’t work as good as before the update:

It’s no more possible to zoom pictures and notes, except for PDF-documents.

The new function ‘tap once to make text editable’ can make problems: You first have to lock the write protection if you’d like to tap on a link in a document, otherwise it’s more difficult to open it without accidentally changing to the text editor. But even if the protection is locked, and you follow a link to a website and then want to tap on a link on this website, the text editor of the (actually locked) note could open accidentally instead of the linked page.

You are correct, HTML documents no longer zoom; instead we tried to optimize their size and display for the respective screen. – If insert images into your own documents, just tap them and they open as separate document.

Links in HTML documents are a bit specific in the context of the iOS’ default gesture handling, but if you touch and hold the link for a moment it will open.

Nevertheless, opening a picture in a seperate window doesn’t make any sense anymore, because many pictures are much smaller in the seperate window than in the document itself. Even if you choose to import pictures in original size, the original pictures must be very very large. Especially if there is written text on a picture, it can be difficult to be able to read it.
The only solution at the moment ist to open a picture in the seperate window, and from there open it in another app…

I have one serious issue though: when I return to Notebooks from another app or the home screen, the books list disappears. All that is left are the smart books “recent documents” and “key words”, and a blank open document on the right side of the screen. When tapping the title bar (‘Notebooks’), the books selector appears, but selecting a book only brings me back to the two aforementioned smart books. Selecting one of them again loops me back to these smart books. In other words, I am completely stuck, I have to kill the Notebooks app every time in order to access it again normally.

The root book (‘Notebooks’) still had a password set. Even though protection was disabled in the prefs, Notebooks apparently went into protected mode when switching apps (also when switching on the iPad after an auto-switch-off).

I did the following steps:
– activated protection in the preferences
– switched off password protection for the ‘Notebooks’ book
– switched off protection in the prefs

If I protect a book on, say, my iPad, it is impossible to have it show up on my iPhone after synching with Dropbox. To see the “protected” books on the other device, I have to UN-protect the book on the original device.

This forces a choice between defeating either synch or protection. 🙁

Of course, the information, it turns out, is readily available on the Mac version — with no Protection at all, AND also via the Dropbox app on all devices with NO “protection.” So I’m not really understanding the value of the feature.

I would like TRUE protection of notes and books, such as encryption, but since the info is so easily accessed outside Notebooks, I think this better qualifies as “masked” or inconvenient access, not protected.

Am I misunderstanding / misrepresenting the situation?

Anyway, the rest of the app is truly wonderful and I can see using it more and more especially when the Mac version stabilizes and comes into its own. (Please re-think the Trash Can function; misleading behavior now! I have lost documents to it because it is not clear what is actually selected for deletion.)

protection in Notebooks really is just protection, it is no encryption (http://www.notebooksapp.com/ios/protection/); adding encryption to an app that is sold outside the US is not straight forward, but we have taken the first administrative steps that now allow us to actually encrypt documents. So, in a release or two, things will be better.

Regarding the sync behavior: the way it is intended (and I just checked that on my devices here) is that protecting a book on the iPad will be protected on the iPhone after sync. This means that in order to see it on the iPhone you need to unlock Notebooks. Isn’t that the case for you, too?

Yes, it seems that some devices on iOS 4 have this issue; it is related to the new “tap once to edit”, which works fine on iOS5. Let me confirm, we did successfully test that on iOS 4 devices before the release, but there seems to be a constellation of device/iOS version that escaped us. – We are putting together a bug fix right now.

Love, love, love Notebooks, and appreciate the update. Pleased to see Voice Memo improved—but find it does not function properly, on the iPhone (iPhone 4, iOS 5.1). The numeric count on the far right side of the playback progress bar, is cut off, and unreadable. And, on the far left end—there is no Play icon to tap. Instead, one has to create the memo, tap it once to open, although it will not Play—and then back out to root tree, and tap again to open a second time. It works properly on the iPad 3, but not on the iPhone 4. Could you help, Alfons?

You are right, we need to look into this; one of the iOS updates interfered with our implementation …

As a workaround for now, if you press the home button twice and then swipe right you reach the audio controls. When a voice note in playing in NB you can use these to start/stop/pause the playback. Anyway, this is no more than a workaround.

I have not been able to use the ‘Send to “The Hit List”‘ feature yet: half of the times nothing happens, and the other half the app crashes, both on the iPad and on the iPhone. To me it would be very useful being able to send tasks to The Hit List, otherwise I will not use tasks in Notebooks, which is a pity.

Are you sure that NB crashes? When sending a task to THL, NB needs to close, but THL should open. If you are not sure, take a look at the iPhone’s or iPad’s Diagnostics (you find that is settings) and you will see where the problem is.
If it is NB, please let us know again.

Well… I couldn’t tell you whether it closes or crashes. It does not zoom out as the rest of the apps do when they close, Notebooks just abruptly disappears from view, that’s what makes me think it crashed, but could it be it just closing.
But the fact is that nothing happens in The Hit List. I never saw it opening, and never got any task into it. Nor on my iPad nor on the iPhone.